Greg Abbott discussed his campaign for governor with Mark Davis of KSKY.
MARK DAVIS: Morning, sir. How’re you doing?
ATTORNEY GENERAL GREG ABBOTT: I’m doing fine. Good morning, Mark.
DAVIS: Listen, I know you know Cuccinelli well. You guys were fellow attorneys general, warriors, shoulder to shoulder, he, like you, a hero in battling against ObamaCare. He almost pulled it off. Should we be thrilled that maybe that promises for the future or upset that the Republican Party didn’t support him more.
GENERAL ABBOTT: A little bit of both. Remember this, he was outspent, from what I remember, four-to-one. And you just can’t be competitive in a race for governor in a state like Virginia when you’re outspent by that much. The Democrat who won just had a tidal wave of advertising and expenditures that Cuccinelli, the Republican, just couldn’t keep up with. I know you know this, but Cuccinelli was down by roughly 10 percentage points up until about a week ago when finally the general public began to realize what Ken Cuccinelli and I have been talking about ever since 2010, and that is, Barack Obama was lying to America when he sold the ObamaCare package, when Virginians and the media finally woke up to that, the gap quickly closed and Cuccinelli almost pulled it out last night.
DAVIS: We haven’t spoken in a couple of weeks, and it’s been an amazing couple of week, an incredible month for the reputation of ObamaCare, and I don’t just mean the website. You’ve been tracking this, I know, and you’ve fought ObamaCare at every turn for the attorney general position. How has this month been working out for you?
GENERAL ABBOTT: Well, the month has been doing great. Speaking of ObamaCare, it is highly defective. But we are sending a message to the president who is going to be in Dallas, Texas today, and we’re letting him know we’re not giving up on our fight against ObamaCare because we’re pointing out another one of the huge defects, and that is that the ObamaCare program, the way that it’s working, is that people’s private, personal medical information is being given out either by these navigators or by the system. This defect subjects the ObamaCare navigators and the ObamaCare system to potential legal liability here in the state of Texas. We are not going to let this abusive, overreaching program to try to sink its teeth too deeply into Texas.
DAVIS: We’ll talk about some gubernatorial campaign stuff in a minute, but first, the job you still hold, that’s of attorney general. Take me behind the scenes if you will, as we had a judge in Austin, to the surprise of no one, stand in the way of the very sensible abortion restrictions that are the will of the people of Texas. With head-snapping quickness, that thing was in the hands of the New Orleans Court of Appeals and was set back right. Tell me the story of how that happened.
GENERAL ABBOTT: Well, when the challenge went to the federal district court, the trial court, to be honest, I wasn’t going to be surprised if the judge struck it down. That judge’s primary goal was to operate with steed, knowing that the law was going into effect and he had to make a decision, knowing that it was going to be going to the Court of Appeals, and so, we just wanted to get it done, get it out of the trail court. When we went to the Court of Appeals, we had a very strong three judge panel made up of all women, and this three-judge female panel unanimously agreed that the Texas law was perfectly Constitutional. They listed all kinds of Supreme Court decisions that explain why the state has a valid interest in the health and safety of women who undergo procedures, and that’s what the state did in trying to pass this law. This ensures that the procedure is going to be safer for more women and that women will not be subject to some of the horrors we’ve seen in other states.
DAVIS: You’ve dealt with it so much as an attorney general and as an attorney, I think you gave us a window towards something I want to understand better. Will judges sometimes, Judge Yeakel in Austin, who we all grumbled when he stood in the way with these, will judges sometimes say, look, okay, I’m going to hit the pause button here just to hit the pause button, knowing that days later there’ll be a more thoughtful examination of it at a federal appeals court.
GENERAL ABBOTT: Sometimes that happens. He forecast when he first received the case that he knew that he was just a weight station, and he would just be passing it on. That said, this is also the same federal district court judge who ruled against us on the Planned Parenthood funding that we got quickly overturned in the court of appeals. I think it may be the same federal district court judge who ruled against us on the sonogram law who we had quickly overturned on the Court of Appeals. So this is a well-worn pathway, and I can’t tell if this judge is doing it to just move it off of his docket and get to to the Court of Appeals or if he sees these laws from a different lens than what the Constitution requires.
DAVIS: Now on the merits, just on the pure merits, we’ve given pro-choicers half the pregnancy. Like that’s not enough? And all we’re essentially saying is we’re going to have some safety requirements? We’re going to have some standards that clinics and doctors are going to have to meet? It does not in any way take away someone’s Roe v. Wade rights. We’re working on that in the mean time. So by what definition is this a constitutional impingement of peoples’ rights, as the Left will assert?
GENERAL ABBOTT: You’re making two key points, maybe both of which the general public does understand. And that is, what was going on here is a law that ensures that women still have five months to make a very, very tough decision in their lives. Only after a child has been formed five full months, and can already feel pain, are we saying that we just have to draw the line here. And we cannot allow abortions after a child has developed for five months. So it shows how extreme those are who were against the law. But the other thing that you touched upon that a lot of people don’t know, you mentioned Roe v. Wade, in Roe v. Wade itself, the Supreme Court was extremely and explicitly clear. They state, like Texas, has a legitimate state interest in protecting the health, safety and welfare of mothers and women who go through this procedure. And we have seen story after story after story across the nation about women meeting with severe health issues and health challenges because they didn’t have the kind of doctor who should be providing the kind of care that they deserve. And we want to make sure that if women that go through a procedure like this, they’re going to be taken care of.
DAVIS: One last thing before you hit the campaign trail events from the job you still hold…The Texas Supreme Court heard arguments this week about whether the state can grant divorces to gay couples, which is an odd question. But we don’t recognize gay marriage and your answer’s always been “no”.
GENERAL ABBOTT: Right.. and it’s “no” for the reason you pointed out. And it was a cornerstone of our argument yesterday in the Supreme Court. And that is, in order to grant a divorce to same-sex couples, you have to recognize marriage in the first place. And under the Texas Constitution, we don’t recognize marriage by same-sex couples. And this is nothing more than a backdoor way to try to undermine the Texas constitutional provision saying that marriage in Texas is a union between one man and one woman.
DAVIS: And I want to help people with the logic of that. Because I talked to some people yesterday and said listen, we don’t have to recognize gay marriage to take a look at a gay couple that has moved from another state, where their marriage was legal, and recognized. And they move here and they don’t want to be married anymore, that’s just a divorce granted in Texas. But hang on, because if we grant divorces in Texas, that is an oblique way of saying, you almost have to recognize the existence of a marriage before you go through the nuts and bolts of dissolving it.
GENERAL ABBOTT: You exactly have to. Here’s an analogy and that is, can you and I go to court against each other and dissolve a contract that doesn’t exist? No. The court would have to say, well, in order to dissolve that contract, we’re going to have to say it doesn’t exist in the first place.
DAVIS: There you go. Let’s back up to the pro-life issue because it is that issue that gave you an opponent who has a remote chance of being within shouting distance of you, which rarely happens in a Texas gubernatorial race. But there is a fresh poll. The people at Public Policy Polling show you, if you’re the nominee, with a 15-point lead over Wendy Davis. Was her whole phenomenon a flash in the pan?
GENERAL ABBOTT: Listen, I’m going to take this race very, very seriously. Here’s the reality, Mark. And that is I don’t know if the fact she was propelled to popularity because she supported late-term abortion is going to be a fact or not. What I do believe is that I think she’s going to get tens of millions of dollars from Steve Mostyn and a handful of other trial lawyers in the state. She’s raising tons of money from New York, from Washington DC, from California because she’s going to try to impose the same style of big government that we are seeing in Washington. You know, Mark, she actually voted not only in favor of Obamacare but to expand Obamacare in this state. And so we have a great threat to the future of the state of Texas with big government liberalism trying to hijack the state. And so I’m going to go to work every single day fighting to ensure Texas remains the freest and strongest state in the country.
DAVIS: Before it is an Abbott/Wendy Davis race, there is the primary. And here’s the portion of any interview where I ask Tom Pauken what he’s saying about you and you what you’re saying about Tom. I think last time I talked to brother Pauken, I’m just looking for differences between y’all. Because they are relatively few. But he mentions a couple of things that I want you to address. One is what’s the difference between you and him on toll roads and the whole trend towards tolls rather than taxes and the relationship that Texas has with some foreign companies who are doing us the favor of building them and maintaining them? There are some who say there are some accountability problems, is there a difference there on toll roads and our future?
GENERAL ABBOTT: Well I don’t know where he stands there, but I can tell you where I stand on it. That is that I believe that transportation needs to be funded out of the general budget. I have unveiled the first plank of the platform I’m running on. One of which is fiscal reform and fiscal responsibility. I have two issues in this regard that will provide adequate funding for roads. One Mark is that we have to stop these diversions of transportation dollars that were intended to be spent on transportation that are spent on other things here in the state of Texas. The second is we to take a part of the motor vehicle sales tax and devote that to transportation. If we do those two measures, we’re gonna add three to four billion dollars more annually to transportation funding, adequately addressing our roads so we don’t have to be talking about toll roads.
DAVIS: Did we get hosed so many years ago when they said, “hey this lottery thing, it’s going to pay for all the education we need.”
GENERAL ABBOTT: Yeah so whenever someone starts trying to sell you a program like that, you need to be very cautious and maybe sometimes run away. Whenever they start trying to tell you “well listen lets stop funding something this way, and lets start funding it a different way,” they are just taking their hand out of one pocket and putting it into another pocket. We need transparency in our system, we to engender greater confidence in our government by forcing government to do what they say, if they say, “we are going to invoke these funds to transportation, they have to live up to that promise.” Mark is goes back to the same thing that has an overwhelming majority of Americans upset today and that is, Barack Obama looked people in the eye and said “if you like your health insurance plan, you can keep your health insurance plan. If you like your doctor, you will get to keep your doctor,” he has proven to be a flat-out liar on that issue, and Americans are frustrated that they are losing their health insurance. The same thing applies in regards to transportation in the state of Texas, we could eliminate a lot of this congestion if we are just more honest in the way we are spending peoples money about the transportation dollars that are already being sent to Austin, Texas.
DAVIS: And last thing, we’ve got a bunch of constitutional issues and propositions that have passed, they are sailed by yesterday. Including the big Prop 6 about water. Everybody knows we’ve got to respond to our water needs. I was talking to my friend Tom Giovanetti at IPI and he said water needs are there, but he wondered about transparency and the formations of these resulting water boards with how accountable they’ll be and the playing of politics into where that money is spent. Is that a valid concern?
GENERAL ABBOTT: It is a valid concern, and people whenever there’s billions of dollars in an issue, you’ve got to be very concerned about it and we want to achieve two or three things. One, we need to ensure local involvement and local decision making with regard to how this money will be spent regionally, and we need to make sure that all the local needs are going to be met in a fair and transparent way. Second, at the more statewide level, we have to ensure transparency in the decision making process so everyone feels like the decisions being made are fair. The third we have to do is make sure that the money is being spent responsibly, and remember this because this is a key component of this program, the money is being repaid to the city system, this is no a onetime loss of two billion dollars this money is supposed to be paid back into the system. So we need to make sure that is open and transparent and successful in getting that money back.
DAVIS: So were you ok with Prop 6 passing?
GENERAL ABBOTT: Let me give you the outline, and I’ll answer the question. Part of my fiscal reform package is to put limits on the Rainy Day Fund. Our Rainy Day Fund is our savings account. We’ve seen twice in the last decade that we have run out of money and we needed to make up for a shortfall. So I am proposing a constitutional amendment limiting withdrawals from the Rainy Day Fund to these issues. One for revenue shortfall, two to pay down debt, three is for one-time withdrawals for infrastructure purposes which this satisfies this criteria. We cannot Mark however use it to pay for core functions of government operation. If you do that you’re going to suck this Rainy Day Fund. And the last thing I want you to understand because it falls in conjunction with those onetime withdrawals, you can not lower the Rainy Day Fund below a certain minimum balance otherwise the state’s budget would be too weak.
DAVIS: And what figure occurs to you? Because it’s about eight or nine million now, the two million comes out for this. What would you like the minimum Rainy Day Fund amount to be roughly?
GENERAL ABBOTT: I think a percentage is better, a percentage of the state’s budget, as opposed to a certain dollar figure. The seven percent mark has been used in the past. Seven to eight percent in the savings account of the budget is a fair mark and so I think we should stay around that level.
DAVIS: The Greg Abbott for governor website is Gregabbott.com, we appreciate you sir, and talk to your often I know. Thank you very very much for your time.